"Despite what years of local monopoly may have taught many veteran journalists, readers don't automatically show up for whatever you publish."

Laura Kicey crowdsourced the funds for a photo tour of Iceland. In return funders got prints and she wrote up the journey in this fantastic piece of travel blogging.

I'm torn on this one. On the one hand "boring" looking blogs are incredibly empowering as they give people a platform with no need for design skills. On the other I love hand crafted stuff and do care what my web presences look like.

Would normally skip such a title but it's on A List Apart and, skimming through, looks pretty comprehensive and useful. To dwell over.

"New research shows that almost 50 per cent of schoolchildren say writing is boring. The solution, discovers Hilary Wilce, is to let them loose with digital technology"

The other day my friend Pete Ashton posted an article in which he declared he was no longer a Social Media Consultant. Sort of.

Or rather, it’s not that he’s no longer doing what he’s been doing for a living for the last couple of years to go and do something else, rather, that – cutting a long story short – he’s not going to be describing himself as such any more.

This issue came to me last week and it worthy of much thought. In fact it's probably the biggest issue facing those wishing to see blogging take off at a hyperlocal level. In short, those producing the blogs are part of the communities they're writing about so if they write something controversial or unpopular this can affect them personally. We haven't spent much time looking at the dynamics of the local communities which we're looking to network in new ways. I suspect they might be more complex and fragile that we imagined. And someone might get hurt.

A slightly more ambitious attempt to collate the "blogs about a specific area" that exist. Directories like this are doomed to failure in the long term but do act as a useful bridge to the creation of communities of interest. <a href="http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/08/18/utra-local-blogs-update-and-a-new-local-directory-nutshellorguk/">More about the intentions here</a>.

Promoting his new book (which I've not started yet) Scott gives a very basic introduction to the origins of the form and dispells a few myths. 35 mintues of talk followed by Q&A. Worth watching.

Social Journalism or Social Reporting is a term that's been bandied around recently. I was struggling to figure out how it was different to old fashioned blogging and the like. This definition makes a bit of sense - it's the curating of the stuff that bubbles up from social networks.

"What’s Social Journalism? It’s what you do when you gather information in social media channels and then report it to your readers. Watching a Twitter #hashtag for posts related to a critical local issue or big event, then publishing them in a roundup or sidebar on your news site? That’s Social Journalism. Scanning YouTube for the latest video from a protest, county fair, or city council meeting? That’s Social Journalism."

Great example of using Posterous as a blog. Posterous is built to be updated by email, taking attachments and formatting them nicely. Check out the mini-photo galleries. If you predominantly use email this is a quick and easy way to run a blog.

Something I wrote about blogging and Twitter as a way of processing ideas which might be a useful way to think about your blogging.

I found this irreverent talk to be rather inspirational, but then I'm a fan of both speakers. Your mileage may vary especially as they're talking to a room full of people-like-me so injokes abound. But I hope there's some good stuff in there. "We talked about building a blog you can be proud of, trying to improve the quality of your work, reaching the people you admire, and maybe even making a buck (in a way that doesn’t blow your deal)."

Lloyd Davis ponders how theatres could use blogs. This is from 2005 when blogs was pretty much all there was. Add Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, etc as appropriate. "A young lady in South Carolina was asking about advertising for theatre. It struck me as ironic – and I said so – that just as advertising and marketing folk are realising that they have to go for authentic emotional engagement and telling a good story, theatre people, for whom this is their stock-in-trade want to know from advertising bods how to go about it. Obvious to me it is that a blog about the production would be a really cool way of generating and sustaining buzz. So I stuck my oar in."

Short essay by Meg Hourihan from way back in 2002 which bears reading again. Sometimes the obvious needs re-stating.

Michael Grimes has adapted the US Airforce blog assessment chart into plainer English "more suitable for UK Third Sector organisations" and provided a high resolution PDF to print out and stick on your wall. A handy, level headed guide for when someone writes something about you online.

Chris Unitt raises the idea of extending the artist/writer/poet/dancer-in-residence concept to blogging.

Yes, it's a big pro-blogger list post and I was skeptical, but a quick skim reveals a few items I found illuminating so there's a chance you might too.

Interesting and in depth article by Simon Reynolds. I disagree with parts (specifically I see blogs and zines as fellow travelers not in opposition) but that's just quibbling over details.

Highly amusing report by Ewan Spence on my successful campaign to come last in the Weblog Awards. I was rather proud of this so it's good to see it on record.

Chris Brogan on blogs posts where you know the outcome before you publish.

should you be using it for inspiration.

Two foolhardly nerdlings decide to read all three hundred issues of Cerebus at a rate of one a week and write extensively about them, an endeavor which ill last about five years. I celebrate such insanity and will be watching with interest. <i>via <a href="http://rhbfictions.blogspot.com/2009/01/cerebus-diablog-1-issue-down-299-to-go.html">Rich B</a></i>

A nice Long Now-style project from Antonio Roberts and Jon Harrington which sees a frame from Antonio's film and a sentence from Jon's novel posted every day for a year. Also available on <a href="http://twitter.com/deaddeadline">Twitter</a>.

"Sometimes you just seem like a single dad, sometimes you just plain get it wrong but most of the time you just sound like a chronic manic depressive, fucked off with everything and thoroughly fed up with the world."

Chris Unitt is succession planning for CiB. He plans to hand over the reins in January. Anyone interested should get on his (or my, come to think of it) radar.

Nice short interview with Chris who took over CiB from me in the Spring. Gives me a chance to say how pleased I am with how well he's found his voice on the site and has made it his own over the last few months.

A comprehensive guide to redirecting your hosted Wordpress.com blog to your one on your own server. Haven't tried it but it appears to make sense.

I've been working with Mark Ball of the RSC on a research project about how culture organisations can engage with online communities. This is the first of a few posts. Comments and ideas very welcome!

Matt Haughey, who created MetaFilter back in the day, has a moan about how things ain't like they were. I love this sort of stuff.

Merlin Mann is one of a small pool of old-school bloggers I have a lot of time for. Here he outlines some basic and pretty obvious guidelines, so basic and obvious that I forget them from time to time. Worth a read.

"The journey from sketch to almost finished study for a future painting." This is the sort of thing I encourage artists to blog about - their process. A great example to show around.

Starting point for an informal bunch of WordPress related doings around Birmingham.

Love how 'female' is in quotes. But seriously, a handy list to skim through for new reading material.

"will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform" using a bunch of currently being developed plugins. Hmmmmmm. This could be really good for internal group blogs.

Following Adam Tinworth's "Why Media Gets Community Wrong" rant.

Great rant from Adam Tinworth which can be summarised as "Community is not a place. Community is an approach to publishing." Plenty in there to learn from.

Email in some images and text and it creates a nice looking web page. Do it again from the same email and you've got a blog. Very impressive and I need to write more about why but for now here's the link. Go check it out.

Jonathan, aka OrangeJon, has a new "professional" blog. Since we share a lot of ideas I'll be following this.

Handy post from Caitlin Fitzsimmons rounding up the issues surrounding dealing with anonymous misogyny online.

Those geometric shapes that have been appearing on Wordpress.com comment threads? They're generated from IP addresses. Fantastic!

Francine Hardaway on teaching "normal" people about the social internet. Twitter etc are too advanced - it's all about Yahoo. Interesting.

Rather nice photo gallery plugin for Wordpress

Very detailed explanation of how they moderate comments. Could be useful to those managing a large community site where things gets a bit fractious at times.

Joanna Geary on lessons learned from an anonymous misogynistic attack left in her comments.

by local music types on the whole. Warms my heart to see this. My work here is done.

A narrow and stupid opinion from the CC prompts Nick Podnosh to ask for comments, and he gets some really interesting ones.

Emma (aka editorialgirl) writes about our relationship which is so ambiently intimate it seems strange to call is that. Thought provoking stuff and reminds me I should blog my feelings more.

Applying "link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff" to news orgs.

Stef talks through what was done in this long-time-coming redesign. Chris Unitt's p0wnage of CiB is complete now.

a blog-hub for people in Birmingham who use internet stuff. Lovely name!

One week on Chris does the linkage and draws a line.

Paul Groves asks some important and interesting questions about blogs in newspapers. I should address this myself since I blog for the paper in question.

"a plugin that lets you write series of posts in WordPress, without having to deal with the hassle of manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post."

Hmmm......

Interesting questions from the editor. My comments to follow.

"In case some of the mainstream media haven't got this yet - 'THE WEB DOES NOT OWE YOU A LIVING'. It doesn't care that you have been doing this for years, you have to earn your eyeballs like everyone else." - Andy Dickinson

Useful. I'd agree with all of this.

Another journalist with a blog, this time from the 4Talent stable. She's finding her feet so go say hi. (And do scroll down to the excellent Torchwood review!)

Jon Bounds rounds up some new blogs from, of, and about Birmingham.

"So you’ve decided to ‘go online’. How do you manage such a process?" Dubber outlines the steps, which start with a piece of paper.